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02.06.2012 10:37

Sjómannadagur - Sailorsday

This weekend is the so called "Sailorsdaysweekend", which is held annually to honour the sailors and think about those that died during their hard work on sea. No ships are on sea, all the sailors have a weekend off. The weekend is celebrated with a sail, competitions between the crews of the ships, a Mass on Sunday and of course a dance on Saturdayevening.

Jói, Ingólfur's brother in law, invited us to sail with him on his boat "Soley". We took Hjördís with us and met Jói, Hulda, Jói litli (son of Laura and Hjalti), Haukur and the kids, Benedíkt, Jón Hafsteinn, Sigrún and their daughter Hulda Briet at the harbour. We were 8 grown-ups and 6 kids on board. The weather was great and everybody in good mood when we sailed out of Húsavíkharbour, following all the others on their way to the sea. Most boats were going to Lundey, but we stopped a bit and Jói showed the kids part of his daily work. Looked like the fish knew he was not allowed to take them that day and were biting like crazy. So we drew them up, Jói showed them to the kids and then we of course let them go back to their habitat again.

Northsailing's Garðar had spotted a whale and was following it a bit and we did that too. It was fun to try and guess where it would come up again and we got a glimpse of it before it went down again.

Afterwards we stopped a bit and had Prins Polo and soft drinks. We watched 2 aeroplanes flying quite close over the ships, but didn't get good pics of them. Then we made our way back to Húsavík, where we decided to have a look at the competitions going on.

It was announced that they were still looking for teams to compete and Jói got the brilliant idea to sign a crew for his boat. He needed 7 members, but had only 5 (Ingólfur, Jón Hafsteinn, Benedíkt, Haukur and himself). I didn't hesitate and signed up and then we could talk a friend of Benedíkt into it too. First task was to row a boat, which sounds easiert than it actually is as we were not experienced in that. Think we did quite well, got over the finishline in exactly 58 seconds and ended in the 4th or 5th place. We thought that was everything and went to get ourselves some free hot dogs. But suddenly we were called to the obstacle race...

It was a relay race, everybody had to do something different. The first one had to nail a long nail into a block of driftwood, the second one to eat a whole box of unsweetened skyr, the third to put yarn into a needle, the forth to dress himself in oilclothing and run front and back, the fifth to eat icelandic "kókósbollur" and drink a glass of coke afterwards (makes great foam), the sixth to sack race and the seventh and last one to carry 28 tin weights front and back. Each of these weights has 2,5 kilos, so it was 70 kilos they had to carry.

We did very well and ended in second place! Last thing to do was rope pulling. I said "Pass!" there and prefered to take pictures. By thinking very well about when to start and winning our first opponent, we came to the finals and ended there in second place too. Think we were to overall winners ;)

We had a lot of fun and I think nobody was disappointed that we took part in all this.

Takk fyrir okkur, Hulda og Jói!